Now we have demonstrated audio output through the Billy Bass speaker, it’s time for everyone’s favourite early 2000s passtime: pirating MP3s ¹.

I downloaded Phatt Bass’ original video using a YouTube to MP3 site—I won’t link to one here as it’ll be gone by the time you read this, replaced with a dozen more just like it.

Before editing my pun into the audio, I wanted to separate vocals and music into separate tracks to make editing easier. Given the general poor quality of Billy Bass audio output, I’m not sure why I bothered, but I did. Luckily, another thing the web is now flooded with is websites to extract vocals from music using “AI”. I tried vocali.se and vocalremover.org, both of which allow limited free processing and file downloads; they both performed pretty much as well as each other.

My final source of audio was a text-to-speech voice saying “bass” (as in the fish). I played with several and settled on elevenlabs’’s “Michael” voice. I had to make the text “bass fish” to get it read in the correct sense, then chop off the word “fish”. Despite choosing it for how deep the voice was, I still had to deepen it further to make it sort-of match “Phatt Bass guy”.

A few minutes in Audacity later, and… I realise I’m no good at this. Despite joking that this project should happen 20 years ago, I’ve spent none of that time learning audio editing, so of course I’m terrible.

An hour later, and I’ve decided this is good enough for a poor fish pun through a dodgy speaker:

Now let’s get music and fish movement matched up!

1. Parody is a protected uh… something, I’m sure it’s fine. ↩